My first book project, Shards, deals with the specific historical weight, traumatic hauntings and political implications of fragmentation in writings from the Caribbean, Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa. (Post) colonial domination is spectacular: it dazes and dazzles through its theatrical displays and routine exhibitions of power. It simultaneously ensures that its subjects are under the constant surveillance of a crushing force that fragments the community as well as any sense of coherent identity. Shards examines one of the privileged ways that francophone literature has both registered the fracturing effects of strategies of subjugation and cut back against their mechanisms signaling a fragile interruption. I trace the testimonial, insurrectionary and critical valences with which francophone authors have infused an aesthetics of fragmentation and reappropriated elements of its ancient genealogy. Considering both formal and representational fragmentation, I ask: what is the specific significance of the disintegration and dismemberment foregrounded in this body of literature born of violence?